This is generally good advice. The standard practice from all crowdfunding platforms is to only send money to creators after it has cleared out and can not be clawed back.
I also have some sort of protection from Stripe because they have a good KYC and risk assessment system.
To have access to it, you need to use the Communick services. So let's say that you are a musician using https://communick.stream to promote your work, you'll be effectively contributing to the growth of the Fediverse.
There is no commission from the funding part, it makes money by providing a service. To be a member of the Collective you need a paid plan on Communick. The cheapest one is $29/year, which gives an account on Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix/Funkwhale.
Compared with Patreon which takes a 8% cut, any creator that is receiving more than $30 per month will be better off by using this platform instead.
Yes, the principle is very similar. The only difference is that Liberapay AFAIK does not aggregate all donations.
Sounds like something that could be useful for Lemmy itself, no?
jurisdiction will allow you to stream your music collection to your friends
Not what I said.
What I am saying is that there are jurisdictions where people can operate and will you not be persecuted (i.e, chased/harassed) even if some lawyer can find an IP address tied to "illegal" activity. Anyone that has looked into how to run a seedbox will quickly find out that there are plenty of providers catering to this market.
The barrier of entry is not kept intentionally high. That's what gatekeeping is.
I think we should encourage people to contribute into the project
Yeah, and one such way is to go through the documentation, work through the points where things are not clear and make a PR with the changes. That is much better for everyone involved than going around calling for a conspiracy to keep beginners away.
$1.6m is nothing
The way the fediverse works it would require each instance to raise their own money.
Or, if push comes to shove, to operate in jurisdictions where people are not persecuted for disobeying draconian laws.
And the consolidation and gatekeeping of resources to the few seems
What gatekeeping? And what "few"?
According to fedidb, there are 775 Lemmy servers deployed. So you have at least a few hundred people that are not involved with the project and that have managed to deploy Lemmy. I'm among one of those, and I have access to the same resources as you did. It may not be trivial, but it certainly is within possible.
Again, sorry that you are having trouble, but there is no conspiracy here to keep you away from having your own server.
Look, this is software that has not even reached version 1.0. Of course it is incomplete. I totally understand your frustration, but if people are telling you "this is not for beginners", maybe it would be wise to listen to it? You still haven't answered my question: are you trying to run your own instance to learn or because you want "support the Fediverse"? If the former, it seems that you are trying to bite more than you can chew. If the latter, there are plenty of other ways to help beyond running your own instance.
AirBnB and Uber can afford to fight in court
Now, they can. But before they were established companies, they were just a handful of people working out of legal grey areas and figuring out shit as they go along.
I'm not encouraging people to openly go and break the law, but I also don't think it's healthy to never dare anything and just play along with morally corrupt systems like the one we have just because we are afraid of the consequences.
The exact opposite. They call "boring" buildings as anything related to the "modern/post-modern" architecture, where everything is made of glass and steel, or just slabs of concrete that have no ornament whatsoever, or that is so detached from the local where it has been built that makes it impossible to know if the building is in Shaghai, Nairobi or Mexico City.